SOURCE: A review of The Rainbirds, in Landfall, Vol. 23, No. 2, June, 1969, pp. 189-94.

In the review below, Evans finds that while The Rainbirds is occasionally threatened by "artistically gratuitous passages of authorial comment," it is exemplary of Frame's "immense verbal talent."

The newest inhabitant of Janet Frame's world is thirty-year-old Godfrey Rainbird, an English immigrant who has become a Dunedin clerk, and who has a wife, a house with a view, and two children. In The Rainbirds, Godfrey experiences death and resurrection in suburbia. He is taken lifeless to the morgue after being knocked down one night on the way home from a meeting. His wife, her parents, his children and sister smoothly assume the attitudes of grief expected and accepted by society; his older sister Lynley decides to emigrate from England in time for the funeral, and this ceremony is expensively, lavishly prepared without love but with...